Rory Kennedy on Her New Documentary Last Days In Vietnam

The Oscar-nominated director on why she narrowed her focus to one specific part of the story.

The final days on the ground in Vietnam are a lesser-discussed aspect of the war, a narrative that hasn't quite gotten its due in the history books. In response, filmmaker Rory Kennedy, who is best known for her 2007 documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (and, of course, her family lineage), has created Last Days In Vietnam, a documentary that recounts the tail end of the war as the Northern Vietnamese army marched into Saigon. The film unfolds like a thriller as the remaining American soldiers and their South Vietnamese allies attempt to evacuate as many people as possible from the city, despite opposing orders from Washington. The documentary, which scored a Oscar nomination for its efforts, will air on PBS tonight, April 28, and will soon be released on DVD and Blu-Ray. It's a film worth watching, regardless of your opinions about the Vietnam War, and it reveals why history is often created by those who elect to do the right thing instead of the sanctioned thing. We recently spoke with Kennedy about Last Days, its focus, and how a documentary filmmaker ensures that their work is factually accurate.

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What made you want to focus on this specific era of the Vietnam War?

I've always been fascinated with Vietnam and I think it's a seminal moment in our nation's history. I was interested in telling the story of the final days in part because I feel it's the story that hasn't been told, and also because I felt it had relevance today with our struggles to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

You began making the film over two years ago. Does it continue to have the same political relevance now?

I think it does. It raises important questions. When I show it to audiences in theaters, at almost every screening, people make that connection on how pertinent it is today. The story is very much told by the people who were on the front lines—it's first-hand accounts, there's no narrator, there's no historians looking back. It's all people who were on the ground experiencing what happened. So I think, ultimately, the film is a reminder of the human cost of war. That story is one we can never hear enough of, and it's important to be reminded. Sometimes we want to engage in a war for financial reasons, for strategic reasons, for moral reasons, for all sorts of reasons, and it's important when we're making that decision to remind ourselves of what happens to the people on the front lines when we start this process.

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How difficult was it to find the people who recount their experiences in the film?

Some of them had written books—some of the Americans and the marines who were there during those final days. So we started with that for research. That helped lead us to some of the main participants that we ended up filming. As you interview people, they tell you about stories that seem worth pursing and will suggest other folks who can help unpack the story in greater detail. When we started this process, we had maybe a 20-page treatment of the story we wanted to tell. And as we got deeper into the research and the specific people who will tell the stories, you go off on tangents that feel relevant, but that you didn't anticipate in the initial treatment.

What were the sources of your video footage?

A lot of the footage came from archival houses like NBC, ABC and CBS. I sent a team into those archives to dig deeper and find footage that really hadn't been seen before in a wide way. And then we also got lucky. There was a fellow who was a sailor on the U.S.S. Kirk, and I had mentioned we wanted to profile someone from the Kirk to a guy in the U.S. Navy Department of Historical Preservation. He had just had a conversation with this sailor a few months ago who had gone up into his attic and found a box of untransferred footage that had never been seen. I pursued the guy and ended up flying him out to L.A. because he wouldn't Fed-Ex [the footage] out to me. It was a treasure trove. That was just sheer luck. That story was in our treatment and I had no idea there was footage of it—I don't think anybody did.

That makes you wonder what other footage is laying around in attics right now.

Yeah. I think there is a lot of hidden footage out there that lends itself to some extraordinary stories. And I think that's going to be the case more and more, given how we now all have our iPhones and record everything. It will become a question of, is there too much? And can you actually find anything that's worthy?

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When a documentary film is completed, what is the process for fact-checking it?

Fact-checking goes on throughout the process, where we'll just double check that whatever somebody says is true. But then once we have a locked script and finished audio, we'll go through a process where we fact-check that. Basically, everything that anybody says, we double check and make sure we have two, if not three, sources for it. If we don't have those sources, we make a point of not having those sources. In addition to that, we have advisors who are historians and who have expertise in the overall story who watch it and give feedback. [The production companies] and their lawyers go through it. It's a pretty thorough process. You would be hard-pressed to find something inaccurate in the film. I think there are interpretations of events and opinions on what should get more attention or how it should be portrayed, but I don't think there is anything that is factually incorrect.

Vietnam is a very divisive event in American history. Was it important for you to stay objective at all?

I never aspire to be objective because I don't believe in objectivity. It's important to be truthful, and it's important to make sure that the audience has a solid sense of what the expectation should be of a particular film. For example, I did a documentary about my mother and it was very much a P.O.V. film. It was from my perspective. It was never meant to be an objective, balanced portrait of my family. I narrated the film. The first thing you hear is my voice in the film, because I want the audience to be in line with the expectation of what it should be. It's a very narrow story. In this film, the title says 'Last Days In Vietnam.' So it is not the story of Vietnam, it's not the politics of Vietnam, it's not how we got into Vietnam. It's not the history of Communism and the Cold War and America. It is the story of what happened during the final days of the war. People will still come into it and say, 'Well, why didn't you tell the story of the beginning of the war?' or, 'Why didn't you tell the story of Kissinger and how he got us into this mess?' Those are all worthy endeavors, but it's not this film.

In the film, several people discuss how they did something because it was right, not because it was legal or it was asked of them. Is that a sentiment that comes up a lot in discussions of historical events?

You know, I think certainly the world—and our country—has been defined by people who haven't necessarily abided by the laws and the rules. Civil disobedience is part of our nation's history and has redirected our country in many instances, from the feminist movement to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. People standing up and saying, 'This isn't right,' is certainly a quality I admire in specific circumstances. There are people who do that and have a different set of politics, and then I don't necessarily agree with what they're doing and why they're doing it. But the act in and of itself of saying something is wrong and standing up for what they think is right [is something] I generally admire.

Did you come across anything in the making of this film that shifted your personal perception of the war?

The whole story is a pretty extraordinary one, and one that I, like most people in this country, didn't have a complete handle on. It was pretty eye-opening to have a deeper understanding of what exactly happened. I think the stories of these Americans and South Vietnamese were very heroic. The film takes an unflinching look at U.S. policy and the damage that it did, but it distinguishes between the policy and the people on the front lines and how they acted. It made me proud of these Americans and proud of what they did. That was a feeling that I hadn't had. I appreciate that.

When you look at the way the media represents global conflicts today, do you think we get a complete sense of what it's like for those people on the front lines?

Well, part of why we're able to tell this story now is because these events took place 40 years ago. In the immediate aftermath of the war, none of them told their stories. When I asked these people why they didn't tell their stories, they said they didn't see what they were doing as being heroic or extraordinary. They did either their job or what they thought was right. Only looking back at it can you see it in a full context. I think it's hard to compare this story to what's happening now, because the stories aren't necessarily emerging out of Iraq and Afghanistan. And also in the way we see them now—we might be able to see them more clearly in 20 years.

In your experience as a documentary filmmaker, do you think films like this have the power to change or shift opinions about political policy?

I do. Listen, I think they can contribute to it. I don't think films in and of themselves create radical change, but I think a film can contribute to people's understanding and deepen their understanding and help contribute to a shift. If you look at films like An Inconvenient Truth, it created a shift and contributed in myriad ways that are undetectable to our appreciation of the environment, and changed climate policy in this country. But can you make the direct link to that film and concrete change? I'm not sure. But it was seen by enough people and talked about enough and had enough reach, that it would be hard to argue that it didn't. Similarly, a film like Last Days In Vietnam—and many of the other films that came out this year—can make a difference and deepen our understanding of history, and hopefully help impact the decisions that we're making today as a nation.